Grantee:  Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen's Association

Contact:  Melissa Sanderson (mel at sign ccchfa.org)

The Multi-species Community-Based Fisheries Monitoring and Managing Tool is designed to be a portable, freely distributed ecosystem-based management (EBM) tool that provides real time management functionality to track multi-species fisheries quotas and interactions with protected species, as well as assist in community based management decision making.  

New England’s groundfishery is undergoing a transition from input to output control management, resulting in multiple species’ quotas being allocated to community sectors to manage internally.  This is creating a demand for a tool the sector managers can use to process and analyze multiple streams of electronic federal data, stakeholder data, tolerance levels/priorities, and environmental variables.

The tool will also have a database shell option that allows multiple EBM tool databases to be joined throughout the region.  Additionally, there will be an optional visual spatial analysis component, to create maps of catch and discard distributions and interactions.